Dr. Ola Awad is a research associate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. She received her medical degree from Suez Canal University, Egypt and her PhD in anatomy and cell biology from the University of Iowa. After finishing her postdoctoral fellowship in pediatric oncology at the Johns Hopkins University, she joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Her research focus is modeling neurodegenerative disorders using human induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). In 2012, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund to study the role of autophagy dysregulation in neurodegeneration using GBA1 mutant iPSC-neurons. Her work uncovered a novel mechanism linking GBA1 mutation to lysosomal dysfunction through deregulation of TFEB, the master regulator of the lysosomes and autophagy. Dr. Awad has extensive experience in pre-clinical research using human stem cell models and has published many research articles in peer-reviewed journals.